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An anonymous reader writes "Remember when we learned that Facebook had resumed talks with Skype? Well, it turns out that Facebook is considering buying Skype outright. 'Skype is reportedly talking to Facebook about some sort of deal. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been involved in internal discussions about buying Skype, while Facebook also reached out to the Luxembourg-based company about forming a joint venture.'"

You've got a good point: if Facebook users start using Skype to talk to each other instead of reading and writing, they'll end up illiterate. I think the big question here, is why did Skype do their trials in Detroit instead of somewhere more affluent where more people are on the "have" side of the digital divide?

I'd get a good chuckle out of someone trying to trademark "Phonebook", it would point out how ridiculous trademarks are getting. If someone succeeded however, I'd probably cry too.

That would be almost like someone getting a trademark on the word 'face' [slashdot.org] in the field of 'Telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users'.

Making a data call really isn't Harry Potter magic shit. It's a lot easier when POTS isn't involved, although involving POTS is still entirely possible. There are a few OSS PBX systems, notably Asterisk and OpenPBX, that you can slap on a server on the Internet and use to handle incoming data calls and a ton of other things as well. There are a number of Linux soft phones that will work either with one of these PBX systems or standalone for computer-to-computer calling across the Internet. The only real difference is the commercial software puts a shiny face on it and builds out the infrastructure required to make it convenient to use.

If you slap an Asterisk box on a static IP on the open internet, and then link your POTS phone number to your asterisk box through a directory service like E164.org, the 4 other guys who do that with asterisk can dial your phone number and their asterisk servers will realize that you're doing that too and call you over a data connection instead of through the traditional phone system. I'm pretty sure Asterisk can also initiate video conferencing sessions.

Why would I use three different client types for different communications when one covers them all? That sounds a lot like having one car to go shopping, one to go to work, and one for the weekend. Personally, I don't have the inclination to maintain three cars, and one which does all three jobs is ideal.

Why would I use three different client types for different communications when one covers them all? That sounds a lot like having one car to go shopping, one to go to work, and one for the weekend. Personally, I don't have the inclination to maintain three cars, and one which does all three jobs is ideal.

Well, I might have a van or SUV to do my shopping, a Prius or other hybrid for the commute, and a motorcycle for the weekend. And a truck for when friends need to move.

If you haul gasoline for work then you need a tanker truck. If you like to 4x4 on the weekends then the Prius you use to go shopping isn't going to cut it. I suppose using one mediocre application for many different purposes is ok for some, but there is a reason mIRC is still around.

I have an online DnD group that I play with on weekends. Between then, we keep in touch using the text chat built into Skype. We don't use video, either (although that might change due to some friends from a different DnD session moving away).

Having it all in one nice, compact package is really nice. Keeps problems to a minimum, too. Lord knows trying to coordinate seven people between three different programs is a nightmare and half.

We do the same thing. We've tried the group video chat using the free preview, but in the end the video screen ended up being hidden, even by those of us with multiple monitors. We also used MapTool (rptools.net) for a virtual tabletop, so that was always maximized on one screen, and I usually had the SRD or our campaign wiki open on the other screen.

Skype sat in the background, giving us the group voice chat. We'd occasionally text chat there too, but MapTool has it's own chat window (which now supports

It's simple: Skype is to Ekiga as Windows was to GNU/Linux circa 1998. When end users think of VoIP, they thing of Skype, not Ekiga, and only people who are both technically sophisticated and who "get it" (that is, people who want to avoid proprietary software) are the ones using Ekiga. To make matters worse, Ekiga for Windows is poorly supported, poorly functioning, and difficult to configure -- so GNU/Linux users who want to communicate with Windows users are left in a difficult position.

How well do Ekiga do NAT traversal? I think the problem-free nature of the Skype system for such is what got it going in the first place. And now that it is entrenched, its proprietary nature keeps it there as few people are interested in making the jump to some FOSS system. This largely thanks to having everyone they know already using Skype.

All the software pieces exist as OSS projects but it's not only the software that made Skype big. It's been the company behind it that signed contracts that let me connect with standard phone networks all around the world. I can call POTS numbers from within Skype, I can get a virtual phone number so phones can call my Skype client. I can redirect my Skype account to a phone number or vice versa, with voice mail. That's something that a software project cannot do: you have to be a company and start competing with Skype.

There were also hoards of VoIP companies offering those services for under half the price charged by Skype, although some bundled the in-dial and out-dial. In fact, there are only a very few marketing heavy VoIP providers like Vonage charging more than Skype. The real issues are :

(1) Skype's user experience obliterates every other VoIP provider : Download & run Skype, make account, done. No tweak this setting if you use symmetric NAT. No please pay us first. etc.

(2) Skype has NAT traversal that afaik equals or beats any other VoIP software & provider combo. In fact, they use almost exactly the same NAT traversal tricks, but they may ask other clients to provide TURN (relay) when STUN fails, and maybe their STUN servers are better too. TURN gets expensive if the calls are all free.

(3) Skpye simplifies finding people you know who use Skype. And they've always encouraged people to talk to strangers, making it more likely that your friends already use Skype.

(4) Skype's encryption gives small businesses greater confidence.

If you wish to compete with Skype, you must (a) match them on PTSN price while offering awesome STUN and TURN, (b) match or beat them at friend finding, (c) beat them on encryption, i.e. use an open source client, preferably Zfone, and (d) offer "something more".

But that's kind of the problem. Skype is a single company and a single app. There isn't any confusion or choice. You say "I'm on Skype" and folks know how they can get in touch with you. You say "I use Ekiga" and they look at you like you've grown a third eye.

There isn't really one. Ekiga is close, but if you've ever tried to use it you'll know it's really tempramental. Pidgin's voice and video support is somewhat popular but I've no idea how well that works either, though it does supposedly interoperate nicely with Google Talk on Windows.

"With EIGHTEEN public diaspora pods available, each with TENS of seeds, I think it's safe to say that everybody who's anybody is on Diaspora by now."

I guess I am not anybody then. I am on their Facebook fan page and I had no idea they were up and running. I hope they don't that attitude and that they work harder about letting ordinary people know about the service or they will not even make a dent in replacing Facebook.

Given that they're open source advocates, I expect that they will have the typical FOSS tin ear for and pronounced distaste for marketing and advertising, which they would need to actually attract more users to their service.

Honestly, Diaspora is on track to become permanent "fun-time" beta abandon-ware, just like a large percentage of other Open Source projects (see: Sourceforge.net). Kudos to them for trying, but it seems to have been a poorly conceived notion that was poorly execute

How disappointing. With all of the hype about uber geeks contributing serious money to the project I was expecting a Facebook alternative that respected privacy.

I wonder if Diaspora fizzling out had anything to do with Mark Zuckerberg contributing to it.

Realistically, probably not.

College is the last time in a person's life where flaking out is okay and college students have large demands on their time. Zuckerberg probably knew this and knew his donation wouldn't produce any results beyond ma

I could be off-my-ass wrong, and I'll readily admit I'm speculating on their future prospects. But at this point, I see very little that suggests they're going to make a real go at Facebook - or even Myspace, before Myspace finally implodes. I don't think they've fizzled quite yet, there's still small amounts of activity over at github, but there certainly doesn't look like there's much of a trend towards more interest/contribution/users, and if you're challenging an established competitor, and you're not

My problem with Facebook and privacy is that Facebook changed the rules about what was private, several times, without notice, without permission and without apology.

Had those things been involved I could have chosen what I wanted to reveal like I would with slashdot, another blog or a web board.

I use Facebook now with the assumption that everything will be public, in time. I was looking forward to a "privacy aware" alternative to FB so I could relax and socialize more with my friend via the web. Now,

http://www.linphone.org/ [linphone.org] You also have XMPP clients that do VOIP as well as VideoChat.Heck Gtalk, MS Messenger, Yahoo Chat and many others will handle most of what you can do with Skype except for calling a phone number which might just be a matter of time if Google doesn't to that already.You know in many ways the phone number system in the was a great geocentric routing system. 1 == long distance, area code would get you to that general area and then the general area was broken down into exchanges roughly

This is the problem: In order to make calls between two people behind a NAT work, skype (ab)uses other, completely unrelated, clients to get the connection going. This would never fly in an open application because the helper feature would be immediately removed or disabled by the "other" clients.

This was a huge discussion point when skype first came out. If you got turned into a skype "supernode" it would eat your internet connection. Universities had major problems with this. But apparently slashd

What's so hard to achieve? One iOS app, one Android app, sorted for the majority of smartphone users. I think the real barrier to a true OSS competitor would be setting up servers and doing deals to allow calls to normal phone networks.

List of Open Source VOIP Software [voip-info.org]. Feel free to verify or modify the source to your liking. I think Ekiga [ekiga.org] sounds like a nice starting point, though I don't know how secure it is. It even supports calls to normal phones, so it seems I was wrong about that being a massive barrier.

Personally I don't care about trustworthiness or security in voice/video chat, since I've only ever used it for chatting to friends. For business use then being assured of confidentiality is more important of course.

Really? Are we going to stick with this "change the source yourself" argument?*sigh*

I tried using Ekiga... couldn't get it to work between a Windows and a Linux client. I wanted to video-chat with my wife and kids while on business trips. Then tried several video chats with no consistent success. Grudgingly tried Skype, and it works great. I now can video chat with my parents across the country as well.Sorry, but Skype even on Linux just worked.

I have a CS degree (from way back) but I am no longer a programmer. I'm not about to pick it up just to get video chat to work.

Skype's success was almost certainly down to it's client. It was user friendly, clean, modern. It combined instant messaging with phone with free person to person voice chat. If you want to have an idea how revelatory this was, compare to abominations like Net2Phone.

I was certainly using it WAY before Android or the iPhone turned up. It had a Windows CE client which I used on several occasions to make cheap calls via an iPaq.

That said, it's gone a down the route of other IM clients stuffing in ads and o

Hey, use our social network. Why? Because. (I'm almost paraphrasing the last one there, Orkut isn't bad, but nobody knows the damn thing exists, ADVERTISE GOOGLE, YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW THIS STUFF, IT IS YOUR BUSINESS)

Orkut is hugely popular in Brazil. Why? I have no idea; different cultures can be very different from one another and not make much sense to outsiders. Why do the Japanese believe that a person's blood type indicates their personality?

I doubt it has anything to do with culture. Rather I suspect it's a question of the network effect. If 10 people you know already have Orkut accounts and 2 have Facebook accounts, which will you find more useful?

Yep. Network effect and chaos theory. Somewhere along the line, one Brazilian loves Orkut, and convinces a couple of friends to join it, and then next thing you know, the whole country's on there, like a butterfly flapping its wings and starting a tornado. In the USA, some people joined FB faster, so things swung that way.

What's interesting however, is that these things can change. It wasn't that long ago that MySpace was the dominant social media site in the US, but now everyone's moved to FB and MySpa

It seems that google already bought at least one VOIP company, Gizmo. Maybe the lesson here is that there is not money in VOIP, but if for firm like Google and Facebook that is the business of collecting and selling personal data, knowing who you are calling can be a huge pile of money. Connecting telephone calls to ads could increase the value of the ads. Calling car repair shops, all of the sudden you are seeing ads for car dealers. All of the sudden many calls to another city. cheap airline tickets a

GoogleTalk/Voice combo is close to skype now. It even operates over open protocols. I know people who have both GV and Skype, and they use Skype more, because more people use it. Google needs to get off their ass and promote Talk/Voice better. And dumping Gizmo5 was one of the dumbest moves Google did. I'm just hoping the glimpse we got of sip support last month is a harbinger of things to come.

That, and I'm still kind of pissed that Google took international TXTing off Voice...

I'm not sure how to feel about this one. On one hand Skype as a company could do with a huge amount of improvement. Their support is frankly the worst I've ever dealt with from a company of their size, and their software is only one release away from breaking again (and never worked correctly on Android).

I don't have any love for Facebook as a company, but frankly I have such a low opinion of Skype that it couldn't get too much worse, at least I hope. The funny thing is that I pay Skype hundreds of dollars a year for a service which is only borderline passable, but just like the telcos they're the only game in town, so there is no motovation for them to improve.

If Google released a competing product tomorrow I'd switch. And, no, Google Talk is NOT remotely comparable to Skype.

At least facebook likes open protocols.. Their chat is just jabber, and I can connect with Pidgin.. I like that, and would love to see them either open up the protocol to something new, or perhaps move it to libjingle or something.

Anyone at Facebook in a position to know anything about any such possible deal is not legally allowed to say anything. If Facebook isn't dumb, they started any discussions with a confidentiality agreement due to their legal requirements not to say anything. Also, since Skype is privately owned, the majority owner would have nothing to gain by publicizing the talks.

That means that whoever is talking to the press about this is either:1. some other party with a motivation for derailing the deal, such as eBay (a minority owner of Skype),B. an insider at Facebook illegally attempting to manipulate the stock price, orIII. somebody with no clue who wants to seem cool to the business press.

I know for a fact many users and businesses use Skype because it's encrypted end-to-end. Now, that may have already been compromised some time ago and thus no longer secure in China. But, I for one believe that Facebook would hand over the keys to the Chinese government in a heartbeat. I doubt Google would as there's already a bit of contention between those two.

Fixed that for you. Do you really want Facebook to know the phone numbers of everyone you call with Skype and share it with 300 of your closest friends in one of their inevitable revisions of "privacy" practices?

No, that's just it. It very well can be encrypted end-to-end yet have virtually worthless security. That's why whenever someone merely brags about having encryption, it should set off alarms in your head. You can't meaningfully talk about encrypted communications without also talking about how keys are exchanged. Anyone who glosses over the topic of key exchange is probably bullshitting you. And guess what: Skype glosses over the topi

If, like me, you do not want all your private information "integrated" with Facebook and its ever-changing use of private information, maybe this is the time to contact Skype (maybe via posts to their blog?) and letting them know how you feel about having all your calling information and other Skype data "integrated" with facebook.
I for one have long ago deleted my Facebook profile after I started seeing how pervasive their tracking and data agglomeration on individual has become and how lax they are about sharing that data with other vendors and application developers.
I share Julian Assange's assertion that Facebook is "near-evil" and cannot imagine continuing using Skype if it is a Facebook extension.

I like Skype -- I'm a paying customer. I like Facebook. I wouldn't trust Facebook (the company) with anything that I don't mind becoming 100% public, including my credit card, and use it with that knowledge in mind. I am not necessarily interested in Skypeing with my Facebook friends or the awkwardness of socially networking with my Skype contacts (who are mostly business collaborators). [One would hope that everyone has learned the lesson of Google Buzz].

For now, maybe. But in the future, choosing your participation in Facebook may be like choosing your degree of participation in the Internet.

Think about it: 20 years ago, if you wanted to buy a plane ticket you could look in your Yellow Pages, find a travel agent, and call them up to find you something at a reasonable price. You could go to a college campus and pick up a printed course catalog. Gadgets used to come with printed manuals instead of URLs where you can download them. The Internet is not exa

Don't worry, once Skype becomes part of an evil empire, if it isn't already, there's always Viber (http://t.co/wcE4frR for iPhone and now in beta for Android) to tide you over with HD voice and messaging...

Great! Except I cannot limit the search by class year, so I get hundreds, if not thousands of people from the past 20 years since I graduated. When all they need to do is add a "Class of XXXX" filter. How simple it would be.

Wow. I think even Livejournal can do that, and it doesn't even pretend to be a social network, let alone one oriented towards keeping in touch with classmates.

Except I cannot limit the search by class year, so I get hundreds, if not thousands of people from the past 20 years since I graduated. When all they need to do is add a "Class of XXXX" filter. How simple it would be.

So easy that it was one of the original features the first year of existence. Since opening up, they've slowly removed a lot of the features specific to schools and anything that could be considered an app.